Nippon Steel Chemical Co., Ltd. (NSCC), the Company that's a leading manufacturer of OLED materials and owns the equipment and the technology for manufacturing super-purified products with consistent quality in commercial scale in advance of any other manufacturers in the world, and Universal Display Corporation (NASDAQ:PANL), the Company that's lighting the way in developing and commercializing OLED technology for flat panel displays, lighting and other opto-electronics with its proprietary PHOLED(TM) phosphorescent OLED technology, today announced a collaboration to develop new markets for red phosphorescent OLED materials. As the background of this collaboration, there is the fact that a commercially-available red host material from NSCC is compatible with commercially-available red phosphorescent OLED emitters from Universal Display.

By using red phosphorescence, overall power consumption of the display can be reduced by more than 40% as compared to using fluorescent red OLEDs. The combination of Universal Display's red PHOLED materials and NSCC's host material, called NS11, offers very efficient, highly desirable red colors with long operational lifetime. These products are currently available for evaluation and commercial use from the two companies.

"We are very pleased that we are able to advance the performance of vacuum-deposited OLED materials technology through this collaboration with one of the world's leading chemical companies," stated Steven V. Abramson, President and Chief Operating Officer of Universal Display. "Working with companies like Nippon Steel Chemical through mutually beneficial collaborations should accelerate the commercialization of high-performance OLED displays."

"Since the time when fluorescent materials were introduced into the OLED market, we started to supply the OLED materials as commercial base. Since then, we have been involved in providing our materials to most of the OLED manufacturers, which have already started to mass-produce OLED devices. However, we recognize that it should be very difficult for the fluorescent OLED system to compete against the LCD system because of the small distinction in power consumption between the both systems. In order to pursue the further enlargement of the OLED market, we consider that it must become a key factor to introduce phosphorescent materials into the OLED market. Based on this point of view, we have mainly focused our efforts on the development of phosphorescent materials. Under such OLED business background, we are very pleased to make this collaboration with UDC, who is a pioneer as well as a basic patents' holder and holds a very high level of the capability that is related to phosphorescent OLED technology. Furthermore, we expect that this collaboration will make a strong promotion of phosphorescent materials, technologies and devices to be accelerated in the OLED market," stated Yasuhiro Shimoura, Executive Officer and General Manager at Organic Display Materials Division of Nippon Steel Chemical.